Taliban promises bloodbath during Saturday’s Pakistan elections

The al-Qaeda linked Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the Pakistanbranch of the Taliban, has announced its intention to launch terroristattacks all across Pakistan on Saturday in order to disrupt the country’s presidential elections. The elections are considered historic, sincethey’ll mark the first time in Pakistan’s history that there has beena peaceful transition from one civilian government to another.

Already, more than 100 people have been killed in terrorist violencein the days leading up to the election. The TTP have beenparticularly targeting the “secular” or Shia political parties, whileleaving alone the Islamist anti-American parties, the Pakistan MuslimLeague-Nawaz (PML-N) of Nawaz Sharif and the Tehreek-e-Insaf (Movementfor Justice) party of Imran Khan. On Thursday, a son of former primeminister Yousaf Raza Gilani was kidnapped and two of his aides killed.

Nawaz Sharif is expected to win the election, but with millions of newvoters, anything might happened. Pakistanis are desperately lookingfor a “hope and change” candidate who could solve all their problemsin a moment, and Imran Khan, the former world cricket champion andinternational playboy, has been advertising himself as that candidate.

However, in a stroke of fate, Khan was hospitalized early this weekafter a campaign appearance where he accidentally took a hard fall andfractur0ed a rib and damaged three vertebrae, forcing him to give onefinal televised campaign appearance from his hospital bed. Whetherthis will sink his campaign, or conversely, whether he’ll get a bigsympathy vote, is something we may learn on Saturday.